Seattle restaurant chain speaks the universal language of buzz

Typically,
we attribute most of the best advertising to the biggest, best-known
marketers. But the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the small-budget
entrepreneur should never be overlooked as a fountain of real innovation.
In the face of the "usual suspect" advertising that dominated Major
League Baseball's recent All-Star Game, it was a little guy who commanded
a huge portion of the advertising conversation.

The little guy is Consolidated Restaurants, and the buzz stemmed from the popularity
of another little guy, East-West baseball phenom Ichiro Suzuki. The
idea Consolidated created was a radio ad for the popular Elliott's
Oyster House and Metropolitan Grill restaurants that few of us could
really understand. It's not that the selling proposition wasn't clear,
or that it wasn't aired often enough on the right stations to reach
the target audience. It was that the ad was in Japanese.

For Ron Cohn, owner of Consolidated Restaurants, awareness of the enormous popularity
of Suzuki at home and abroad and the desire to do something that would break through
and generate "buzz" spurred the idea. As a group sat on Pier 56 brainstorming (while
drinking a microbrew or two or ...) someone suggested "What if we do it in Japanese?"
Buzz indeed.

Listening to the ad is a slightly surreal experience. It seems formal and peaceful
in tone, rather emotionless. It takes a second to process that the voice you are
hearing is not speaking English. The next part of the experience is to try to place
the language and then to look at your radio to see whether it's tuned to your usual
station. Then, for some older listeners, there might be a War-of-the-Worlds-meets-Pearl
Harbor moment. Finally, one recognizes a few words. It's impossible to flip the
dial. Really well done.

I realized my Japanese was better than I originally considered when I recognized
the term for baseball hero, which in Japanese is apparently pronounced as "baseball
hero." Also, Consolidated offered the words Metropolitan Grill and Elliott's Oyster
House in English, thank you very much.

As I have said repeatedly in this column, breaking the mold of expected advertising
is difficult, but when it's done well, it opens our minds to receiving messages
more clearly and compellingly. It can make small budgets act large. It can influence
users with a single impact rather than battering them over the head time after time.
This Consolidated ad did just that.

While it's unlikely the ad motivated too many of the thousands of Japanese
tourists who visit Seattle or bilingual Japanese living in Seattle to
choose Elliott's or Metropolitan Grill, the ad generated massive interest
from Seattle residents and a hailstorm of national publicity. It made
Cohn and his restaurants celebrities for the All-Star celebration and
engineered a memory among local residents that should help ensure the
restaurants' popularity for some time to come.